Windows Vista comes with a new way of organizing your personal files. Instead of mere “My Documents”, now there is a lot more - it is called the “Home Folder”. If you noticed, in the Start Menu, there is one entry that is labeled as your name (or your username):

There is more that we can do with this seemingly “nothing much” folder.

If you open this entry, you’ll be presented with something like the following:

I guess there is no need to explain what each of these folders do. You can contact me and ask should you’re not sure of them though!

Organizing it better

Before we proceed, I’m sure most of us, after years and years of using the computer, will have our files stored in our own favorite locations. Me, for example, have a folder called “Music”, “Videos”, “Downloads” all located in various other places (i.e. in the D: drive, E: drive, etc).

I can choose to move (or copy) all my files into these new folders created by Vista, however that might not be the best choice for me, as my C: drive is only 40GB big. How am I going to fit the hundreds of gigabytes of media into these folders just to make it more organized? (Vista stores all the Home Folder contents in C:\Users\YourUserName\)

Don’t fret, there it a solution. I’m sure many will love this.

Let Vista Know Where to find it

Let’s start with something simple, like the Music folder. Most of us did not really explore these folders properly.

Now if you right click on “Music” and choose it’s properties;

you’ll notice an extra tab that you don’t normally find in other folders:

Yes, that’s right the “Location” tab. You can actually tell Vista where do you want to relocate these folders. In my case, my music files are stored in “D:\Music”. Click on the “Move” button and choose where do you want to move the files. Windows will then ask for your confirmation and it will do the moving job for you:

Sit back and wait for the move. Hey, go grab a coffee or something!

Once the moving is done, if you open up your Home Folder again, and click on “Music“, you’ll be directed to your own music folder!

What’s the Catch?

There is no catch - now that the folders are mapped directly, most windows-compliant applications will be able to look for your files easily without needing you to manually tell them where to look.

There are a bunch of benefits that might interest you:

• Peace of Mind - When was the last time you formatted your computer and completely forgot to backup your Favorites, the files on the Desktop, the Contacts saved in your computer, etc? If you relocate most of these folders, you’ll know next time you had to re-format the computer, that these files will be there sitting in your other partitions safely
• More Organized - Now that the files are at their designated locations, you only need to open your Home Folders to find where are your files. You don’t have to create so many folders in other hard drive and go nuts looking for them anymore!

The Final Touch

You can also right-click on your Home Folder link in the Start Menu, and then choose to show it on the Desktop for quick access!

So now you have it on the Desktop:

That concludes today’s guide. I hope this will be as handy for all of you as it is been very handy for myself. If you have any good tips related to this Home Folder feature, do post it up!

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